CORHIO Celebrates Five-Year Anniversary; Continued Growth in Network Size

On the five-year anniversary of the health information exchange (HIE) network’s official launch, CORHIO continues to see major growth in participation, including healthcare providers accessing patient data through the HIE and the state’s hospitals, labs and imaging centers contributing their data to the network.

This month marks the five-year anniversary of CORHIO’s health information exchange network and its continued collaboration with community healthcare providers and leaders to improve care transitions and patient care in Colorado. The official launch in April 2011 was marked by the first hospital – Boulder Community Health – connecting to the network and exchanging data with other hospitals and office-based providers. In April 2011, 10 other hospitals had signed agreements to join the network and over 200 providers had agreed to join. Now CORHIO has 53 hospitals and more than 4,000 provider participants connected to the HIE.

The network has also expanded across state lines into Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming, with technical connections in place to exchange data with hospitals in those areas or other health information exchanges. CORHIO and Quality Health Network, the HIE on Colorado’s western slope, are also working toward full data exchange.

Continued Network Growth in 2015

As previously reported, CORHIO experienced triple-digit growth in network size in 2014 for the third consecutive year. This growth trend continued in 2015 in four major areas – overall active users, participating medical practices, patient portal users, and hospital participation.

• CORHIO closed out the year with more than 8,000 overall active users of the HIE – including physicians, nurses, care managers, office staff, administrators, behavioral health providers, and emergency department personnel.
• The number of medical practices connected to the CORHIO HIE network increased 30 percent in 2015, from 442 to 576.
• PatientCare 360® is the web-based tool many CORHIO participants use to query patients and pull up recent lab results and other clinical data. From January to December 2015, the number of participants accessing PatientCare 360 increased by 54 percent, from 1,810 to 2,788.
• Hospital participation in CORHIO is also strong, with 53 hospitals currently connected and sending data into the network for community providers to access. All of Colorado’s multi-hospital systems are live on the CORHIO network, including Banner Health, Centura Health, HealthONE, SCL Health System (Exempla), and University of Colorado -- and 12 more hospital connections are underway.

Robust Data Delivery to Provider EHRs

In addition to the PatientCare 360 web portal, providers can have patient clinical data from CORHIO’s participating hospitals, labs and imaging centers delivered right into their EHRs. CORHIO is currently able to connect with 29 different EHR vendors, with several more underway. EHR message delivery is another area of growth for CORHIO. (“Messages” are any piece of HL7 clinical data, such as a laboratory result). By the end of 2015, CORHIO had delivered 7.1 million messages into provider EHRs, as compared to 3.3 million messages at the start of 2015.

For a list of all participating providers in the CORHIO network or to learn more about our Health Information Exchange services, visit www.corhio.org.